fanagra32

"Opening up"? You must be kidding. Nothing is open there. It's just open-washing. A few nice diagrams, but how the services _actually_ work is still hidden.

Exactly. Open-washing at its finest. Just like OpenAI. "Open" just doesn't mean anything anymore at this point.

> Context: I teach at Princeton and study social media and recommendation systems.

I'm not sure how this context was relevant. Your post was perfectly able to stand on its own feet and convince through content, not through authority. If anything, this "context" removed pondus from it by appealing to authority.

> It is repeated often, but is this really true?

If I look around at (a) politicians and (b) people I respect for traits needed in politicians, then those sets are not fully but largely disjoint.

> Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion

There are other necessary traits though. Empathy. Diplomacy. The ability to compromise. Keeping an eye on the big picture. Current processes don't always select for those traits and there are tons of BS-ers and populists out there while I see people with the desirable traits outside politics and not having any desire to get involved. Putting a camera over their head 24/7 is not going to improve that.

> Make the math use bigger numbers.

Also, add redundancy so that if something is read out wrong then there is guaranteed to be no match. Error-correcting codes have been around for centuries (well, almost). Simplest way to do this is to add a fourth digit which acts as a checksum. Nobody needs to know this, but it will make the legal combinations very few in the space of total combinations, so if something is read out wrong you'll notice right away.

> If we were talking about 1 restaurant, or even 100, that would mean that 1 in 4,096 orders (or 1 every 40 days) are getting swapped due to this efficiency.

Not really.

For swapping to occur, two orders have to be sitting there at the same time with the same last 3 digits and the wrong one has to be picked. So thats one in 2x4096. Every time there is only one order sitting there, the propability drops to 0%. And once there are more orders sitting there, it increases beyond one in 2x4096.

Where the total ends up is heavily dependent on how often multiple orders are sitting there, waiting. It's hard to quantify, but qualitatively we can certainly conclude that the more busy a place and time is, the more likely this is to occur.

If you really think that those guys are extremists, then you haven't seen nothing yet.

Take a peek over to Italian politics and you get a glimpse of what could be coming.

Or Israel.

It is a large machinery and what you are seeing there is the long tail on one end.

There are lots of good things coming out of the European Commission and some really great things. Obviously there is going to come some crap to, and a few really really bad things, like this one. I agree that it's tiring to fight those, but there is no sunshine without rain.

Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best. Making it even less attractive to become a politician is unlikely to improve upon that.

In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?

Why is everybody calling this new toy "AI"? There is no intelligence there. It's just text inference.

People complaining that this thing should not say "I" because that would lead users to antropomorphize it is fine, but they should also realize that calling it "AI" has a similar issue by mischaracterizing what this thing actually is. And this article does exactly that, which is pretty sad.

That can easily be solved by outlawing them. Just like it has been solved with handguns everywhere except the U.S. which keeps refusing to realize that their 2nd amendmend is just harmful. Luckily it's about guns and not about robots, so at least they will be able to regulate that.

It is. I can see that it was written in 2003 and discard it. GPT won't tell me if its answer is based on an ancient lib version.

Essentially, GPT is that rando's webpage but with the metadata stripped away that allowed me to make judgement calls about its trustworthyness. No author, no time, no style to see if somebody is trolling.

> You have no idea if the alternative code you would have written would have been idiomatic or had some critical flaw.

But I have a feeling for both, which is one of the key components of the skill in our trade.

For idionmatic code, I know the degree to which I'm following how things "should" be done or are "usually" done in a given language. If I'm uncertain, I know that. GPT won't tell me this. Worse, it will confidently claim things, possibly even if presented with evidence to the contrary.

For critical flaws, I know the "dark corners" of the code. Cases which were not obvious to handle or required some trick, etc. I'll test those specifically. With GPTs code, I have no idea what the critical cases are. I can read the code and can try to guess. But it's like outsourcing writing tests to a QA department. Never donna be as effective as the original author of the code. And if I can't trust GPT to write correct code, I can't trust it to write a good test for the code. So, neither the original author of the code (GPT) nor somebody external (me) will be able to test the result properly

I tend to do important things in the second half of the month. That way, you don't get an ambiguous 10/09/22 but a less ambiguous 10/17/22. Everybody still needs to be aware which year we are talking about, but you tend to just write day and month anyway, so 10/09 is bad while 10/17 is obvious.

> Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human.

Maybe if you are an American. But non-Americans are puzzled when they see 10/03/08 and are told that that's October 3rd, 2008.

Maybe they are ok with Google seeing search terms but not with Google seeing their companies code.

And you will have no idea whether the solution it presents to you is idiomatic or recommended or contains some common critical flaw or is hopelessly outdated. How can you find out? Back to alt-tabbing to the browser.

Sure it may take a bit more time to get going, but then you'll get it right the first time and learn something along the way. Your copilot example is just another iteration of copy-and-paste some random snippet from StackOverflow in the hope that it will work, but without having seen its context, like from when is the post and what comments, good or bad, did it get.

I'd actually be pretty afraid of a codebase that is created like that.